Accounting and Financial Management MSc postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

On the last working day of each month I reconcile supplier statements against our purchase ledger at a regional builders' merchant. Most balances agree within minutes. The ones that do not are where I have learned the most. Last spring a timber supplier's statement showed us owing nearly four thousand pounds more than our records suggested. The cause turned out to be a credit note raised for damaged stock that had been sent to a branch rather than to head office, and a price increase applied a week before we had agreed it. Neither problem was dramatic, but tracing them taught me how much of financial reporting depends on ordinary documents moving correctly between people. I want to study accounting and financial management at postgraduate level because I would like to understand those systems from the transaction right up to the published accounts, and the judgements that connect the two.

My undergraduate degree in Business and Economics gave me a broad grounding: financial accounting, corporate finance, econometrics and microeconomics. I achieved a 2:1, with my strongest marks in corporate finance and in my dissertation. For that project I examined how three listed UK retailers presented the move to IFRS 16, which brought most operating leases onto the balance sheet as right-of-use assets and lease liabilities. Using their annual reports from the years either side of adoption, I compared reported gearing and EBITDA and read how each company explained the changes to investors. What interested me was not that the numbers moved, since the standard made that inevitable, but how differently management chose to frame it. One retailer led with the effect on alternative performance measures; another barely mentioned it outside the notes. I found the work slow at first, because I had to teach myself to rebuild figures from the notes rather than relying on headline tables, but by the end I could follow a lease liability through a set of accounts with confidence.

My job has given that academic work a practical edge. I process around two hundred invoices a week, match them to purchase orders and delivery notes, and prepare the payment run for the finance manager to approve. I have also helped tidy our list of supplier payment terms, which revealed that several accounts were being paid earlier than necessary. It was a small change, but it made me appreciate how working capital decisions are made in quite modest places. I would now like the depth to understand how those decisions feed into cash flow forecasting, budgeting and the wider management of a business.

Outside work I play cello in an amateur orchestra and have been its volunteer treasurer for the past year. This involves keeping simple accounts, collecting subscriptions and preparing a one-page summary for the annual general meeting, including a comparison of concert income against hall hire costs. Separately, I help my grandmother with her household paperwork each fortnight, from energy bills to pension letters. That has little to do with corporate reporting, but it has made me patient with explaining financial information clearly to someone who does not use its vocabulary, which I think matters as much in accounting as technical accuracy.

At postgraduate level I am particularly keen to develop my understanding of financial statement analysis, management accounting and the role of judgement in reporting standards. I would also like to strengthen my quantitative skills, since my econometrics training was introductory and I can see how useful data analysis is becoming in both audit and finance roles. In the longer term I hope to train towards a professional accounting qualification and work in financial reporting or corporate finance, ideally in a business close to the kind of operational detail I see every month. I am used to steady, careful work, I ask questions when figures do not agree, and I would bring both academic preparation and practical experience of how accounts are actually produced.